


A Recipe for Disaster

by LoneWulffe



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: (enjoy some fluff before we all drown in angst), Cooking Lessons, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2019-02-03 23:46:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12758742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoneWulffe/pseuds/LoneWulffe
Summary: Kara cooks. Mon-El doesn't intervene.Well, they both try anyway. And things get a little... heated.





	A Recipe for Disaster

**Author's Note:**

> No betas like usual. Let me know if you spot an error and I'll fix it.
> 
> This one's set during that blissful period between 2x17 and 2x19... somewhere. Or you can just ignore that and enjoy the fic as is. Happy reading!

> “ _I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself, 'Well, that's not going to happen.'” – Rita Rudner_

 

* * *

 

The perfect opportunity had finally presented itself: It was her day off and she had the apartment to herself because Mon-El had been asked to fill in for one of his co-workers at the bar on short notice.

“You can do this,” Kara muttered to herself as she flexed her fingers and stared at the offending object in front of her. “You're Supergirl, damnit. Nothing should be impossible where you're concerned.”

Despite not having any eyes, the cookbook stared challengingly back at her. Or at least that's what it felt like to her anyway.

When she had first been confident enough to give it a try, Kara had discovered to her dismay that she was a terror in the kitchen. No matter what dish she tried to cook and no matter how simple the recipe was, something always went wrong somewhere. Alex was no better, having at one point succeeded in producing something resembling a piece of charcoal in her first attempt at frying an egg. Eliza, bless her heart, had made a valiant effort to try and help them overcome their lack of culinary skills at the beginning but eventually settled on diplomatically advising them to find other things to learn after the third time they'd been forced to use the fire extinguisher. (Kara had been too panicked to remember that she could have used her freeze breath and Eliza was secretly grateful for that.)

Alex quickly accepted that being anything remotely resembling a chef was not in the cards for her and fully embraced a diet comprised of nothing but outside food, takeout and instant stuff once she left home and struck out on her own. Her microwave became the only cooking utensil she ever used and if not for her commitment to keeping her home clean, there would have been a layer of dust on everything else in her kitchen except the coffee machine.

Meanwhile, Kara had quietly continued to harbour a dream of being able to cook in some capacity despite everything. Being fully aware of the limits of her capabilities, however, meant that she had to be ruthlessly realistic about her aspirations and that led to her working her way slowly up from instant food. By the time she finished her studies and moved into Alex's old apartment, she had managed to reach a level where she could make simple things like pancakes and French toast – okay, so she'd mostly just focused on breakfast foods but that was besides the point – without burning down the kitchen. It was a point of pride considering everything and she allowed herself to be satisfied with that.

That is, until Mon-El picked up a cookbook and became a master chef practically overnight.

She didn't resent him for it, of course. It was hard to do that when she was the primary benefactor of his newly discovered culinary skills, after all, and she absolutely _loved_ his cooking. As someone who loved to eat, it was times like these that she was immensely grateful for her alien metabolism.

No, it wasn't resentment or even jealousy that filled her when she saw how talented he was in the kitchen: it was a kind of longing with a dash of hope on the side. If he could do it so effortlessly, why couldn't she?

And that was how Kara found herself standing in her kitchen glaring at one of Mon-El's cookbooks as she worked up the resolve to flip it open and find a recipe that she could bring herself to believe she was actually capable of pulling off.

“You can do this,” she repeated, this time with a little more conviction, and picked up the book. After several minutes of alternating between reading the recipes inside and scanning her fridge to see if she had the necessary ingredients, she finally settled on a recipe for Chinese stir fry noodles and started on the preparations. After chopping up the vegetables and meat properly as well as mixing the sauce, she moved on to boiling the noodles and set it aside once it was done.

Now it was time to do the actual cooking... and she would be lying if she said she was actually confident about how things were going to turn out. _Well_ , she told herself, _you won't know until you try, right?_ Hoping for the best but preparing herself for the worst, she put the skillet on the stove and began carefully pouring out the exact amount of oil-

“Kara, I'm hooooooooome!”

She squeaked in surprise and the bottle of oil went sailing out of her grasp.

 

* * *

 

“Okay, so let me see if I understand this correctly,” Mon-El said after they'd cleaned up the mess and sat down at the dining table. “You've never been really good at cooking but seeing me succeed at it made you want to give it another shot.”

Kara nodded meekly.

The look he gave her was one of confusion. “You could've asked me to teach you, you know.”

“Yes. Well.” She tried to shrink into her chair. “I wanted to see if I could do it by myself.”

“...Is this a Kryptonian pride thing or...?” he hazarded a guess.

“No,” she blurted out a little too quickly. The raised eyebrow from him made her fidget. “Maybe a little,” she allowed herself to admit somewhat sheepishly. “I mean, I've been on Earth for years and I can't cook anything more complicated than breakfast foods but you – the crown prince of Daxam who probably never saw the inside of a kitchen until you came to Earth, no less! – have managed to master nearly every recipe you've come across despite only having been on this planet for months-”

“Thank you for the compliment,” he interjected mildly with a wry smile.

“-and honestly I'm not jealous, I'm really not. How can I be, considering I'm the one who gets to eat everything you cook? But...” she trailed off, having realised a little belatedly that she'd begun rambling. “I just... wanted to prove to myself I could do it, I guess.”

He nodded. “Okay. I can understand that.”

“Why are you back anyway?” she asked curiously, having suddenly realised that he was supposed to have been working at that very minute.

“Oh, uh, Zack managed to show up for his shift in the end because his bike repairs didn't take as long as he'd initially expected so I was allowed to leave,” he explained. “I'm guessing you were actually waiting for me to be out of the apartment so you could-” he gestured vaguely in the direction of the stove.

Her silence was answer enough.

“Okay. Right. Um.” He scratched his jaw. “So I'm guessing you want me to go...?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” she huffed. “I'm not going to kick you out of the apartment.”

“But you don't want me interfering, right?” he asked.

“...Yes?” She shrugged helplessly and offered him a timid smile. “You don't have to leave. I just really need to see if I do this without any help.”

“Got it. I'll just...” he stood up and pointed awkwardly at the couch, “...leave you to it and be over there. Reading. Pretend I'm not even in the apartment.”

“Thank you,” she gushed as she got out of her seat as well and made her way back to the kitchen. “You have nothing to worry about, I swear.”

He wisely chose not to respond to that.

Even so, Kara was more tense than she had been before. Mon-El's presence added a new layer of pressure on her already frayed nerves and she hadn't even started cooking yet. While she knew for a fact that he didn't care if she could cook or not, she still felt compelled to show him that she could. (She attributed it to her Kryptonian pride.)

 _Easy, Kara_ , she told herself as she took a deep breath and picked up where she'd left off: pouring the oil. Having accomplished that, she turned up the heat and resisted the urge to use her heat vision to speed things up. Once the oil was hot enough, she added the chopped garlic and picked up the spatula to start stirring-

-only for her first attempt to be too forceful, resulting in some of the oil and garlic sloshing straight out of the skillet and splattering on the wall.

She cringed.

There was no sound at all from the living space. It was the only blessing that could be found.

Gritting her teeth, she steeled her resolve and eased up on the amount of strength she was putting into the stirring. Nevertheless – or perhaps because of it –, her movements still ended up being incredibly stiff and there were a couple of times where the oil came dangerously close to spilling over the edge of the skillet.

 _It's okay, it's okay, it's okay_ , she mentally chanted in an effort to calm herself as she blindly reached for the ingredients she was supposed to add next-

-and almost jumped a foot into the air when she suddenly felt a very familiar body press up against her back and an equally familiar hand wrap around the hand she'd used to grab the ingredients while the other came to rest on her waist.

“Wh-What do you think you're doing?!” she squeaked as she barely stopped herself from crushing the spatula in her hand. _Too close_ , her brain screeched in alarm. _He's too close._ Her senses were already in overdrive due to the stress and his presence was overloading them.

“Sorry,” he said, and to his credit he actually did sound remorseful, “I couldn't just sit back and watch any longer. You were about to add the ingredients in the wrong order.”

“Oh,” she managed to rasp. “Um. Thanks? You can, uh... let go now?”

 _Holy Rao. Get a grip, Kara_ , she scolded herself. _It's not like you've never had sex with him. You're just really stressed and easily distracted right now, okay? That's all._

 _You know what's a good way to relieve stress?_ , a sly voice at the back of her mind piped up out of the blue. _Sex. With your very hot boyfriend who's very available right this second._

She ruthlessly crushed that voice and only snapped out of it when Mon-El started talking again.

“I think I'm going to have to break my promise earlier about not interfering,” he sighed regretfully. “I know you wanted to do this by yourself but I didn't want to see you fail. Besides, it's okay for you to ask for help every now and then even for something as mundane as this. You do realise that, right?”

“Yeah. Sure. Okay.” She was babbling. Why was she babbling? And why was he still so close? Was he doing this on purpose?

Kara chanced a glance at his face, expecting to see a smug grin or taunting smirk indicating he knew exactly the kind of effect he was having on her... but no, his gaze was completely serious and entirely focused on the food.

Wonderful. It was just her going crazy then.

“You're supposed to leave the leafy greens for later because they cook very quickly,” he continued as he grabbed the bowl containing the chicken she'd prepared earlier and tossed its contents into the skillet, oblivious to her inner turmoil. “Add the stuff that takes the longest to cook first and then slowly work your way down the list based on that.”

“Got it,” she murmured faintly. The words themselves went in one ear and out the other.

“Keep stirring,” he instructed her gently and threw in the onions as well before wrapping his hand around her wrist so he could guide her hand movements into tossing the food carefully. “And there's no need to be too forceful about it. Just make sure nothing stays at the bottom for too long or it'll get burnt.”

“I see.” She didn't.

“Okay, the non-leafy greens next.” He leaned in a little more to reach the plate containing the other vegetables, causing his stubble to rub ever so slightly against her cheek. It also caused her already overheating brain to finally give up and slam the 'eject' button.

Was it just her or had the temperature in her apartment risen considerably?

“Now remove it from the fire for a bit, add the leafy greens and noodles followed by the sauce and water – there you go, you're doing great –, stir it a little and then put it back on the stove.”

So apparently she was doing just fine. Which was awesome because she had almost zero awareness of her now robotic actions due to the fact that all her attention was focused on _not_ paying any attention at all to his proximity and the heat his body was naturally emitting.

“You don't have to be so tense, you know,” Mon-El chided her gently. Evidently he could feel how tightly wound her entire body was but remained oblivious as to why that was so. “Everything's going fine, after all, and we're almost finished.”

“Can't help it,” she answered reflexively. That was unfortunately very true but not for the reason he was thinking. How much longer was this going to take? To be more precise, how much more of this could _she_ take? “Guess I'm just getting a little hungry,” she lied in an effort to disguise the real cause of her current state.

 _Hungry for what exactly, hmm?_ , the sly voice piped up again. _The food or him?_

This time, she visualised throwing the voice into the Sun.

“And we're done!” he cheered all of a sudden, pulling her out of her thoughts. The hand that had been on her waist left its resting spot to switch off the heat and remove the skillet from the stove. “See? Perfectly edible food. I mean, I helped a little but you still managed to do it in the end. I'm sure you just need a bit of practice but before you know it you'll be able to do this all by yourself.”

“Fantastic.” With that, she spun on her heels and dragged his head down so she could kiss him senseless.

“...Okay, so I have to ask,” Mon-El said breathlessly once they broke apart for air, “is that a gesture of thanks for the cooking lesson or...?”

“Yes and no,” she allowed herself to be honest, having seemingly lost her sense of shame a good while ago. “You were very distracting throughout the whole thing.”

There was the smug grin she'd expected earlier. “Is that so?” he asked with false innocence as he squeezed her waist with both hands. “And I thought _I_ was the Daxamite, not you.”

Kara glared at him. “Mon-El?”

“Yes?” He was still grinning, damn him.

“Shut up,” she growled and kissed him again even as she dragged him by his shirt in the direction of the bedroom.

 

* * *

 

They'd had to fry the noodles again after that and it didn't taste quite as good as a result. Not that either of them actually cared. (Mon-El smirked throughout the entire meal and Kara had to resist the urge to throw something at him in the hopes of wiping that expression off his face.)

After that, cooking lessons became a regular thing. Both of them found this very agreeable.

**Author's Note:**

> First off, I'd like to apologise to anyone who's been counting on me to feed them with a steady-ish supply of fics; real life has been kicking my ass six ways from Sunday for the past few weeks and I haven't had the time or energy to be fully productive. I'm trying to regain my previous speed though so expect me to be more active again soon. Well, especially since the moment we've all been waiting for is finally upon us. I should warn you guys though; my muse is already rubbing her hands in glee over all the angst fuel she's going to have from now on... but I promise I'll still produce some fluffy pieces every now and then to keep you all alive.
> 
> We're going to be okay, guys. It's going to be a rough ride from here on out but have faith. The Powers That Be are on our side.


End file.
